The Tale of Genji is another Japanese literary work that confuses nature with poems about nature. The Tale of Genji, Kuitert hypothesizes, is based off of poems from the Konkinshu, rather than actual depictions of nature. This means that Heian gardens which were meant to emulate nature actually emulate the poetic beauty of the meisho rather than nature (Kuitert 47). The Sakuteiki is an obvious attempt to create idealized depictions of natural scenes in one’s home, but this hypothesis begs the question of whether or not the poems in the Konkinshu were based off of observations of nature or fabricated based off of the authors’ imagination. This leads to a chicken and the egg conundrum: which came first, the poems or the meisho?
The Sakuteiki,
The Sakuteiki,